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“But in the mood d1sorders, uni- and bipolar, we see a return to more primitive, primary process ruminating without the loss of adult cognitive rules. Major depression is a return to a primitive hibernation state without the wholesale collapse in logical processes that we see in schizophrenia. It shifts the usual thought pattern from secondary to primary process thinking, the embattled autopilot of the past six million years or so. If happiness is a modern invention, depressives return to the affective state of the hibernating cave dweller. Mania, on the other hand, is a desperate flight from dreaded depression and encapsulates the level of primitivity imposed by it.”

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Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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“What the adult says, the rest of us understands. With children and schizophrenics on the other hand or psychedelic users, sometimes their responses are so unique to their own experiences that others just don't get it because that person is still in the process of solidifying the congealing brain organization that language bestows. In a great leap (over fifty thousand years or so) the ego took a 180-degree turn from the caveman's primitive organization, hurtling our cognitive development forward in ways that were unachievable before we spoke.”

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Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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“I once asked a schizophrenic man, "Why does the sun come up in the morning?" His reply was "Tomorrow." I looked at him blankly. When I requested explanation, he said, "Didn't you ever see Annie? The sun'll come up, tomorrow," and he burst into song. Instead of addressing the question from a factual point of view, he simply referred to an idiosyncratic association he had to my question. Adult thinking is universal and understandable by all who speak-a da language. It is a core symptom of schizophrenia, this regressive type of autistic thinking typical of children-or at least we evolutionists think so and most psychiatrists do as well.”

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Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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“It makes sense to pay heed to our past even though the demands we place on our bodies (and minds) are now vastly different. We are still in the midst of the course correction that's happening all around us, but we don't see it. We do notice it when things screw up the process. Illnesses can be considered evolutionary misfires if they do not meet the criteria of Darwin's rules regarding genetic principles that usually lead to extinction.”

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Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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“Out of chaos comes order. And order is supplied by the ego with the help of dopamine suppression in the context of our spiffy new operating system. When order is lost, the chaos of entropy -which lurks behind this process, seeking disorganization and lower energy states - again reigns. All of this goes along with dopamine de-suppression as the fulcrum of organized thinking painfully reverses.”

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Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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“Our minds have advanced from the brutal, terrified, survivalist ethos of Mr. Caveman to the secure plateau of modern-day living. We now expect to survive into our eighties or beyond, to not endure brutal conditions, and to be able to negotiate a society that provides pathways toward success and even happiness, which is one reason I assert that happiness is a modern invention. It is when societies begin to break clown and fail in their promises that we begin to question this exchange.”

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Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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“I assume, that the rules changed after language's fortuitous appearance. Natural selection's decision was a no-brainer so to speak. The brain of modern sapiens with their more intense cognitivity, hierarchically structured mind, and conceptual consciousness trumped Mr. Neanderthal's primitive brutality. Homo sapiens proved that. But the primitive organization's old ways are still trying to recapture territory, the territory between our ears.”

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Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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“This book forwards the hypothesis that schizophrenia is a product of very recent evolutionary events. Although humans, or something like them, have been around for some six million years, language has been extant for a mere 50,000 to 100,000 years. The onset of language was afforded by skyrocketing advances in brain development, the central nervous system ballooning incrementally over eons of time to the point where the fetus's little head could barely navigate Momma's birth canal. The Horno sapiens brain profited from a unique folding of the cerebral cortex, allowing for greater speed and a sly adeptness at symbol formation that led to speech.”

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Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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“When we as civilized adults dream, we work our way back to the primitive organization that humans knew for millions of years before language and civilization. Then we use our unconscious and power of imagination to camouflage the dream in imaginative ways.”

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Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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